All posts tagged Green Zone

Speakeasy has to acknowledge a conflict of interest in regards to “Green Zone,” the new Iraq war film from director Paul Greengrass. Set in American-occupied Baghdad and starring Matt Damon as a do-good officer in search of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the film also features Amy Ryan as a Wall Street Journal reporter who, in her zealous attempt to break a story, is manipulated into doing the bidding of politicians. It’s not a plot point we can get behind.

Nevertheless, Damon is first-rate in anything he does and Greengrass, who helmed two Bourne movies, is the most kinetic action director around aside from Luc Besson. For those whose politics lean to the left, there’s also the added bonus of a plot that suggests the Bush administration fabricated the existence of WMD in Iraq to instigate a war.

Though Amy Ryan has been acting on stage and in film since her teens, it wasn’t until her Oscar-nominated role as a delinquent mother in 2007′s “Gone Baby Baby” that the 40-year-old actress rose to prominence. She quickly followed up the emotionally draining role with a light-hearted turn as a loopy HR rep on the sitcom “The Office.” In her latest film “Green Zone,” which opens on Friday, Ryan co-stars as Lawrie Dayne, a fictional Wall Street Journal reporter who is fed information about the possible existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and helps a Chief Warrant Officer (Matt Damon) attempt to track down the truth.

The Wall Street Journal: What attracted you to this film? You’re a relative newcomer to the world of big-budget action films.

Amy Ryan: I was honestly shocked the first time I saw the film with all the special effects put in. We were shooting in Morocco, which was doubling as Iraq, and there were these unseasonably strong rainstorms that temporarily shut down production. On a film like this, people are able to say, oh, we’ll just take that out in post [production], whereas with a smaller budgeted film, you would have had to tailor the story around the weather. As with anything, if there’s more money, you can be flown first class to Morocco and be put in a better hotel, but at the end of the day, you still need a good story. Without that, it doesn’t matter how much money you throw at a project. Read More »

Two weeks ago, actress and singer Patti LuPone grabbed a cell phone out of the hand of an audience member who was texting during a performance of her current play, "Shows for Days." The bold move led to an outpouring of support from fans fed up with glowing screens. Ms. LuPone gives us her five rules of theater etiquette.